white saviorism
Appearance
English
[edit]Etymology
[edit]Noun
[edit]- The worldview that regards white people as saviors and other groups as needing to be saved by them.
- 1994 May 4, D TUng, “JOY LUCK CLUB: and Asian Women”, in soc.culture.asian.american[1] (Usenet):
- These strike me as pretty apparent examples of White savior mentality. Perhaps I'm being a bit sensitive about this. I admit that the Chao charcters link to white saviorism is a bit weak, but when this is coupled the character change of Harold Livotny to Harold (fill in asian name here).
- 2015, Keith M. Sturges, editor, Neoliberalizing Educational Reform, →ISBN, page 117:
- White saviorism is a form of false generosity; it maintains and embodies white supremacy; it frames the white outsider as the savior and hero and the people of color as too oppressed, too downtrodden, too powerless to help themselves.
- 2016, Lee Bebout, Whiteness on the Border: Mapping the US Racial Imagination in Brown and White[2], NYU Press, →ISBN:
- White saviorism reinforces the goodness of whites by arguing that whites must lift up the Other from their state of savagery. […] In these cases, white saviorism seeks to rescue communities of color from themselves and their nonwhiteness.